Dutch

by Madhuri Pavamani

  Finally she spoke, low and deadly, her tone serious, her words a warning. “He is someone far more dangerous than The Gate—he is a beautiful, tortured soul seeking absolution. Forget him.”

  I began to respond, wanting more information, but she pressed a finger to my lips and the words disappeared. The conversation was finished. The flash of her eyes told me as much, and just like that, she was back, pissed off and irritated. With me. As if the dark stranger had never crossed her path or caught my eye.

  “You have been a very bad girl, Juma. So much, in fact, I was forced to track you down. And you know what I found?”

  She did not wait for my answer and I knew her well enough to know now was not the time to find my voice—she was in no mood for any of my witticisms.

  “Take a guess.” She held up a perfectly manicured warning finger.

  For a second I wondered who did her nails, and then caught myself because that—the daydreaming, the wandering mid-sentence type of behavior—was exactly what was getting me into trouble in the first place.

  “I found you getting fucked in the ass while some redhead licked your clit.”

  “You make it sound so crude when you speak like that,” I replied, the words tumbling out of my mouth before I could stop them.

  And just like that, she had me by the neck, pinned against the wall, squeezing tightly, her nails biting into the sensitive skin of my throat, her grip a painful vise.

  She knew I hated pain.

  “I am hurting you now.” She leaned in close and growled into my ear. “It’s purposeful and intended because you need to pay for your smart mouth and your inability to do anything in a timely fashion. I don’t care who you open your legs for. I don’t care how many lovers you have. Just do your damn work.”

  She released me and smiled, but it was not happy and she was not pleased. I inhaled sharply as she split my skin, running her fingernail along my cheek. The pain shot through me, blinding me with its sear, but I did not even flinch. To do so would only prolong the lesson, which today was obviously one based in pain and fear. Blood dripped onto my clavicle, my own blood. She’d cut me deep enough to scar. She wanted me to wear a reminder of what she was capable.

  Cupping my face, she studied me for a moment. Immobilized, I was at her mercy.

  “Why do you make me do these things to you? These foul things I don’t want to do?”

  “Then don’t do them.”

  She widened her eyes and I was shocked by my own insolence. I closed my eyes and waited. What she would do now? Where she would hurt me, draw blood and maim? Instead, she dipped her mouth to mine and pressed a soft kiss to my lips. My eyes flew open and I sucked in my breath. She chuckled, parting my lips and tangling her tongue with mine. And just as I recovered, she pulled away, leaving me lips parted, desire piqued.

  “That was me,” she smirked, all sexy and shit, “not doing anything foul.”

  “Leaving me in this state is foul.”

  “Juma,” she growled, and her eyes flashed in warning.

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s true.”

  Death kissed me again and smiled. I loved it when she smiled. It was rare and gorgeous and totally turned me on.

  “Go take care of Isobel,” she said, turning and walking toward the downtown exit of the station, “and stop avoiding your assignments, Juma. It will not delay The Keepers, and it only infuriates me. Next time I will not be so nice.”

  She sauntered away and disappeared into the tunnel. Nice? I wiped the blood from my cheek and cursed again for being so careless with my wand. The run uptown was around six miles through city streets, and although I could defy Death’s temporary ban and use our Hub on Jane Street to get uptown in seconds flat—something I was certain she expected me to do—I felt like taking the long way. It was petulant and, in light of her warning, full of risk, but Death had cut me deep and made me bleed. This was my tiny payback. I exited the station and hit the streets, weaving in and out of cars and people until, an hour later, I found myself on College Walk.

  Leaning over and resting my hands on my knees, I took a minute to catch my breath and convince my lungs that the burn was not permanent.

  “Juma! You must be the worst Poocha ever! What did I do to deserve you? How dare the Mistress play with me like this! Claiming she’s giving me the best and then saddling me with a worthless excuse of a woman!”

  Tiny fists pounded my back, forcing me upright much faster than I’d intended. Blood rushed to my head and momentarily doubled my vision, making it nearly impossible to avoid the blows coming at me from all directions. For a Deader, Isobel Zanotti was strong as shit. Finally pulling myself together, I parried one of her blows, snatched her wrist in my grip, and slammed her into the wrought-iron gates of Columbia University. I managed to knock the breath out of Isobel and she stilled.

  “Oh behave, you little Deader.”

  Isobel glared at me. “Don’t you dare speak to me like that, using those nasty terms you Poocha whisper behind our backs.”

  “No one is whispering anything, Isobel.” I pulled her off the ground. “I am calling you a Deader right to your face because you are dead and that’s what my kind calls your kind. It’s all very out in the open and if you find it nasty, I’m sorry, but you should really look at it as a term of endearment.”

  Isobel raked her fingers through her black curls and huffed, but she didn’t say a word. I wasn’t her first pick. Her first pick was Anson. We all knew she picked him because she wanted to fuck him and Death was having none of that. Death didn’t have too many rules for her Poocha, but that was one of them—no sex with the Deaders. And just to make sure Anson wasn’t tempted by Isobel’s luscious mouth or perfect D cups, the Mistress handed her off to me.

  So not only was Isobel annoyed that I was perpetually late, but she was also very sexually frustrated.

  “Endearment, my ass. You care little for my time and even less for me.” Isobel pouted.

  We walked down College Walk, passing John Jay, headed toward Butler. I knew these bricks like the back of my hand, having spent four years at Barnard, but I was hardly the nostalgic type. Pit stops at McIntosh Student Center or Reid Hall would not happen. This walk was all business. I wrapped my arm around Isobel’s neck and pulled her close.

  “Sweet Isobel, forgive me and my perpetual inability to be timely about anything. It’s a curse that is one day going to bite me in the ass, but I honestly did not mean to offend.”

  We walked toward Amsterdam Avenue. She wrapped her chilly arm around my waist, her hand resting suggestively on my hip.

  Just like that, with one touch, I was totally distracted. I had to work at remaining focused on the task at hand instead of completely drawn to the hand at my hip and its effect on my body.

  “Behave, Isobel.”

  She gazed up at me, a cold smile crossing her lips.

  “I know the rules, Juma. You cannot even kiss your Deaders. I also know you and know you want to, that my hand on your body is making you crazy and my tongue in your mouth is all you can think about.”

  Isobel then shrugged me off her shoulder and spat on the ground.

  “This is me telling you to cut that shit out and do your job. I don’t like girls, and I don’t like girls who like girls or girls like you who like anything so long as someone’s got their hands between your legs, so stop looking at me like you can smell my figa. Do your fucking job, and let me get back to the land of living.”

  She then stormed off, an irate mess of curls and frustration, her hands waving about as she talked to herself, no doubt cursing my very existence, most likely wishing me dead—or worse, discovered by those godforsaken Keepers.

  For I was a Poocha, a sworn enemy of The Gate.

  I had nine lives.

  And every single one of them was going to end at the hand of a Keeper in brutal, devastating, horrific agony.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  DUTCH

  What was The Gate?

  Pretty much exactly
what it sounded like—an organization intended to keep the nonliving where they belonged, with that bitch of a mistress, the one and only Death. The way people carried on about Death, how they feared her, one would think she loved collecting souls and spent every goddamned moment running about, seeing who she could force into her realm. But uh-uh. That was not how she got down.

  In fact, quite often she did just the opposite, allowing the dead to return to the lives they had once led, all because she hated feeling overcrowded, like too many fuckers were all up in her space. That’s where we—the Keepers—came in, making sure Deaders stayed in their proper state: dead.

  I glanced up and down the block, dragged hard on my smoke, and checked the street again just to be sure. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. I knew I was being watched.

  “Hello, Dutch.”

  Fuck.

  “Mistress.” I tipped my head in Death’s direction, admiring the curve of her hip as she leaned against the brick wall of the narrow alley. It was dark, and she was backlit by a faded bulb barely clinging to its last bits of filament. Her hair was long and sleek and curled perfectly around her breast, but it was only because I liked it like that. She was putting on a show for me. It was contrived, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to sit back and enjoy it for a second.

  I flicked my burning stub. It landed at her feet. Without missing a beat, she shifted her heel and smothered the smoking butt, twisting her leg slow and sexy, teasing her skirt open and flashing a glimpse of her inner thigh.

  “You shouldn’t smoke, Dutch.”

  “And you shouldn’t flirt with Keepers. Especially after accosting them in the goddamned subway for no fucking reason at all.”

  She sauntered toward me, close enough that her chill surged through me but not so close we were touching.

  “I only have eyes for you, honey.” She trailed her finger along my lip. “Keeper. Singular. One.”

  I pushed her away and kept my hand on the doorknob of number 238. “What do you want, Mistress? Hold up. Let me guess. You want to tell me about the mysterious woman who watched you attack me, right? That beautiful brown piece of ass at the far end of the station.”

  I let my words sink in and hang in the air between us.

  I got her attention. Probably also pissed her the fuck off, but I had her goddamned attention, that was for sure.

  Death leaned back and hissed, a dangerous gleam in her eye. Her purposeful gaze left me feeling naked and turned on, wanting to slam her into the wall and fuck her hard. It also left me wanting to know more.

  More about the woman I glimpsed from afar.

  Brown.

  Inviting.

  Beautiful.

  And probably just another one of Death’s fuck toys, I told myself, those women around the city she loved to turn on and out and make crazy before introducing them to their final sunsets. Stupid cunts.

  “First,” Death whispered in my ear and her voice shot straight to my dick, distracting me because suddenly my jeans were too tight and confining, the bulge in them obvious and screaming for attention, “I want this.”

  I sucked in a ragged breath as she pressed against my length, the sensation like torture because she had done it before, knew what she was doing and just how I liked it.

  “You and I both you know you never just want this.” I pushed her against the wall, kicked her feet apart, and pressed my dick against her thigh.

  She groaned, and the sound was like pure sex. Without pause, thinking of little else besides need and hunger, I unzipped my jeans and rammed myself into her cold pussy.

  “I also want you,” she said with a groan, breathless as I mercilessly took her against that wall, “to back off Arjun.”

  And there I had it—the reason for her visit—and as quickly as I had filled her, I pulled out, pushed myself back into my jeans, and left her there, half-fucked and waiting. I lit a smoke and allowed her a moment to collect herself.

  “You wouldn’t leave a girl hanging like this just because I asked for a favor.”

  I brushed her cheek, pushing a stray hair behind her ear. “You’re hardly a girl, and Arjun is by no means a favor.”

  Death straightened her skirt and glared at me, her mood so quickly changed, so deadly, that it stilled my breath. She was sexy and alluring and totally fuckable, but she was also batshit crazy. And The Gate could not handle batshit crazy. They could do crazy, but Death had stopped doing crazy eons ago. She’d since taken crazy to a whole other dimension and pissed off the fucks who owned me. And if she hadn’t been dead already, I would fucking kill her with my bare hands. Instead, I had her pressed against a wall looking all kinds of pissed, partly because I wouldn’t grant her wish, mostly because I wouldn’t finish fucking her.

  And therein rested her dilemma. What had been her dilemma since the day she and I crossed paths. She liked me, despite the fact I was a Keeper and my sole mission in life was to kill her beloved Poochas, those fucks who just kept coming back and bringing the dead with them. And Arjun was next on my list.

  “I’m going to tell him to hurt you.” She pushed away from the wall and headed down the alley.

  I laughed.

  “Don’t laugh, love.” She glanced back. “One day I’m going to have the last laugh and you’ll think back on this night and realize I was right. Even the great Dutch Mathew should think twice before toying with me.” She disappeared.

  What a crazy bitch. I turned the knob on 238 and entered the dimly lit stairwell to begin the ten-story ascent. I pushed my interlude with Death to the back of my mind as I gazed up the tall flight of narrow stairs, ran my hand over the stubble on my cheeks, and began. Every time I took this staircase I wondered to myself whether The Gate maintained a building with no working elevator as a means to get me to quit smoking. It seemed the kind of dumb-as-fuck bullshit that was right up their alley, taking the stupid route to anywhere all the time. If just one of those assholes had half a brain cell, they would have simply asked me to quit rather than pulling this passive-aggressive bullshit of never having the lift repaired.

  Especially since by now, after twenty-plus years of this exercise in endurance, the same ten flights day after day, year after year, decade after decade, it meant almost nothing to my body. My lungs barely burned and my legs no longer trembled and some days, when I was feeling particularly energized, I ran the entire way.

  Tonight was not one of those energetic moments.

  Reaching the top, I lit a smoke and took a swig from my flask, the burn of the Old Scout hitting me in just the right places, numbing me slightly to face The Gate. As soon as I pushed open the door, my olfactory senses were assaulted by the smell of jerk chicken and roast pork—Rani Rao and James Sussex.

  I checked for the knife at my waist.

  “Dutch Mathew, man of the hour.” Rani put down her fork and turned to smile in my direction, seeming harmless but I knew better: she was deadly.

  Underneath the dark beauty and charm lay a cold-blooded killer. I leaned over the couch and kissed her cheek.

  She giggled flirtatiously. “And they say you don’t kiss the girls.”

  “Only you, Rani. Only you.”

  I moved away, headed in James’s direction to pay my respects, when she pulled me back, studying me with a raised brow.

  “And Death, no?”

  I paused just long enough to be too long.

  “Screwing that cunt in the alley next door.” Rani wagged a finger at me as her eyes lost their warmth and humor. “Tsk, tsk, Dutch. I believe you’ve been warned about keeping that instrument of yours inside your pants, and then that bitch flashes you some pussy and you’re done. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “In her defense, she flashed me her perfectly toned, incredibly sexy inner thigh, not her—”

  Rani landed a wicked left hook up and under my jaw, rattling my brain and loosening two teeth. She then slammed into me with a roundhouse I didn’t see coming because I never saw her leave the couch. My feet fle
w out from under me and I was on my back in two seconds flat, arms up, deflecting the blows raining down on my face. As quickly as her attack began, it stopped, and Rani patted my thigh and then my crotch.

  It was by no means sexy.

  “Where’s the knife?” Rani continued feeling me up.

  “I don’t have a fucking weapon,” I spat. “It violates my oath as a Keeper.”

  “Which is suddenly so sacred to you, is it now?” Rani pulled my dagger free and tossed it to James before gripping me around the neck. “Get up!”

  I leaned on my elbows and spat blood, my jaw throbbing, my right eye already closed and certainly black-and-blue. When these two came to town, it was always violent; no doubt they’d been called in to handle me and whatever perceived wrongs I had committed, was in the process of committing, or might commit sometime in the near future.

  “Don’t tell me you came all this way to inform me of who I’m allowed to fuck.” I pushed myself off the floor and lit another smoke.

  Rani moved toward me, eyes deadly, fists balled, only to be stopped by James. He whispered something in her ear, and she chuckled.

  “Keep it up, Dutch, and the only one doing any fucking will be me, when my dick is so far up your ass you can’t even think straight.” James passed behind me, his lips on my ear, his hand on my hip, his voice low and dangerous.

  He never spoke—Rani was the voice of the duo—so when he did, I paid attention. He had done much worse to me in the past, and I fucking hated him with every atom of my being. There was not a part of me that didn’t dream of ripping him limb from limb, tearing at his innards, gouging out his eyes, slitting open his throat, and leaving him for the vultures that once dominated the Mumbai skies.

  But today was not that day.

  Instead, I moved toward the seat he pulled out and waited as they poured drinks and chatted low with each other.

  James and Rani had been together for so long that I doubt one was ever considered without the other. They were a unit, of force and perversion and death, but a unit nonetheless. She was tiny, with the delicate bone structure of a bird, but fierce. Her dark eyes and pitch-black hair contrasted sharply with her caramel skin, the former quite icy and harsh while the latter hinted at untold sensuality. I had teased her once about our common Indian roots and the third eye tattooed on the back of her left hand, only to receive the first of many beatings she would administer. I never mentioned India again in her presence. James, on the other hand, loved to reminisce on his motherland of Jamaica and welcomed any Jamaican Keepers into the fold as if they were his blood.